Twitter/X as a Bubble for Bad Ethics
X is no longer representative of the national discourse. But many of our journalists and thought leaders believe it is—and that's bad for them, and for our national character.
Twitter was always small compared to other social networks, even before Elon Musk got his hands on it. But it punched way above its weight in terms of the cultural center of mass. There were two reasons for it. First, while Facebook was where the ordinary folks hung out, and Instagram where you’d find the celebrities, Twitter was where journalists and “thought leaders” spent their time. Many of their conversations on the platform were downstream of more obscure corners of the Internet, like web forums and various sub-Reddits, but Twitter was where the big discussions that shaped the news happened, or at least the big conversations among the people who were responsible for everyone else’s picture of the news. Second, even if you weren’t a journalist or thought leader, if you were the sort of people who wanted to follow their conversations and lend your voice to them, Twitter’s where you went.
These combined meant that Twitter was where “The Discourse” was, and if you wanted to see what was happening in “The Discourse,” you went to Twitter. Being active on Twitter, even being exclusively active there, allowed you to keep your finger on the pulse of the national conversation to a reasonably expansive degree—or at least to a much greater degree than spending the bulk of your time anywhere else.
But then Musk came along, and Twitter changed. Musk himself, as the most prominent user of the renamed X, pushes a line that isn’t representative of where America’s national conversation is at, but rather a narrow, (proto)fascist, white nationalist sliver of that conversation. And he dragged the community along with him. A while back, I wrote about how the structure of social media—the way you follow people to construct a single “feed,” instead of participating in distinct rooms or forums—tricks us into thinking the slice of a platform’s users we’re regularly seeing, and the slice of the platforms conversation we’re regularly watching and participating in, is much more representative of the whole than it in reality is.
Aaron Ross Powell
The hard-right turn of Twitter/X as a platform made this worse. And it’s made it worse because many of those journalists and thought leaders who’ve remained—even though doing so, and contributing value to Musk’s ventures and furthering his interests, is clearly an immoral act—haven’t recognized or come to terms with that turn. They spent years using Twitter from a perspective of “this is representative,” and still hold to that. They still believe X is the national conversation, that it is America’s water cooler, when in fact it’s no more those things than Trump’s Truth Social platform.
That the broader conversation on X is functionally indistinguishable, both in its content and the character of many of its participants, from Truth Social interacts in troubling ways with the perception, by those still-active journalists and thought leaders, that X remains what Twitter once was: a more or less representative picture of the wider discourse.
First, there’s an internal, deleterious impact. Who you associate with matters, not just because the people you associate with is a reflection of your own character, but also because the people you associate with shape your character. We cultivate our ethical perspective in collaboration with others, and if those we collaborate with are unethical, we’ll shift in that direction, too. Thus if our thought leadership is mostly interacting with the kind of hard-right and profoundly immoral perspectives of the community Elon Musk has cultivated and promoted, and is reflected in electoral politics by people like JD Vance, then this is bad for those thought leaders, because to the extent it makes them increasingly unethical, in both values and the way they see the world, it makes their own lives worse. You can’t lead a good life as a bad person.
Aaron Ross Powell
Second, there’s an external, and also deleterious, impact. Because these thought leaders are increasingly acculturated to, and accepting of, the narrow and unethical perspective representative of the X community—but not representative of America generally—and because they mistakenly believe that perspective to be relatively mainstream, in their role as thought leaders—as columnists, podcasters, influencers, public intellectuals—they will promote that broken ethical view back to people outside of the X bubble. X still punches above its (diminishing) weight the way Twitter did.
Aaron Ross Powell
The first step to a solution is for the journalists, pundits, and thought leaders still active on X, and who still stick to it as their primary or exclusive platform, to leave. They don’t need to decamp to more broadly representative platforms, because the fragmentation of social media means those don’t really exist anymore. But they should decamp to more ethical platforms, so that they’re not inculcating—in themselves and then, through their work, the rest of us—a system of values, and a moral and epistemic perspective, harmful to flourishing, a functioning culture, and a healthy democracy.